...ask what you can do for the grid! I wish Kennedy is not turning in his grave at the liberty I took with his famous remark. Nothing encompasses the feeling about smart grids better than this statement though. Now, discussing smart grids is like talking about climate change itself, there are ten thousand different facets of it. I may just skim the surface of this topic here.
The grid is the complex network of power generation, transmission and distribution units that deliver reliable, affordable and efficient power to your homes. When you flip the switch at your homes and the electric appliance goes on, you have no clue as to the complexity that has gone into the working of the appliance! The National Academy of Engineering was entrusted with the task of finding out the single most important engineering innovation of the 20th century and electrification, enabled by the electricity grid, came out on top. To give you a flavor of what this means, internet was ranked 13th. And you thought that your iPhone was the best thing to have happened to you since sliced bread:)
However, the grid has remained a 20th century marvel. It is so the last generation, a dumb system that transports power from point A to B, in the same way, every second of its existence! Life has evolved so much that even machines are supposed to get bored performing the same task day in and day out! They also have a life!
In fact, there is a running joke in the power generation sector, which goes like this. If Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were to come back to life today, they would have very different reactions. Bell would be at a loss to understand the iPhones and the BlackBerrys while Edison would instantly understand the entire electric systems! For it has hardly changed in design, only gotten bigger! The R&D in this sector is less than 2% of the revenue, a figure lower than the stone, clay and glass industries. There is an urgent need to take this white elephant into the 21st century. We owe this to Edison, if nothing else!
Smart grids are the answer to this conundrum. Move over, the boring behemoths and make way for the lean, mean, efficient machine! The power of smart grids is the flexibility that they provide. It provides consumers to consume electricity more efficiently and provides utilities with the ability to detect problems on their systems and solve them more efficiently. Smart Grids are the democracy agents in power generation systems, they provide the consumer with the power to decide their consumption pattern. Smart grid systems would give real time information to the users about the cost of electricity, their consumption behavior and how much they would be paying for electricity in that unit of time. This would also help people plan their daily tasks better, so that you can make your heavy electric usage sync with the lowest cost. The utility companies will not have to depend on some distressed user to detect a problem on the system, the smartness of the grid will come to the rescue.
As there are positives and negatives to every idea, so it is with smart grids too. Firstly, they are designed for those places where electricity prices are market driven. When you have a flat price profile, the information provided by the grid would not help much. Then, there is the problem of privacy intertwined with smart grids, bringing back memories of the Orwellian "Big Brother". The smart grids provide utility companies with the power to detect which households are running unnecessary devices when the electric load is at its peak and shut it off at their discretion. So, the 'invisible hand' can turn off your AC during the peak summer days. Most people are not comfortable with outsourcing some of these decisions to some outside authority. There have been some studies which show that people, in anticipation of such an extreme step, would keep their air conditioning on forever, lest they might be shut off at any point of time. This would be severely counterproductive to the basic idea.
There are some unresolved issues with smart grids and some of the best minds are working on it. As the most comprehensive picture of these systems gives us a pause, one implementation strategy would be to start off with smart meters. These meters give us a dynamic profile of our electric usage and could be urgently required. Some parts of the world, like west coast in the US and Europe, have gone ahead with its implementation and are seeing the benefits of it. They seem to be 'smart', so far:)
